Chapter 23. DEVELOPERS file and get-developers

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The main Buildroot directory contains a file named DEVELOPERS that lists the developers involved with various areas of Buildroot. Thanks to this file, the get-developers tool allows to:

Calculate the list of developers to whom patches should be sent, by parsing the patches and matching the modified files with the relevant developers. See Section 22.5, “Submitting patches” for details.
Find which developers are taking care of a given architecture or package, so that they can be notified when a build failure occurs on this architecture or package. This is done in interaction with Buildroot’s autobuild infrastructure.

We ask developers adding new packages, new boards, or generally new functionality in Buildroot, to register themselves in the DEVELOPERS file. As an example, we expect a developer contributing a new package to include in his patch the appropriate modification to the DEVELOPERS file.

The DEVELOPERS file format is documented in detail inside the file itself.

The get-developers tool, located in utils/ allows to use the DEVELOPERS file for various tasks:

When passing one or several patches as command line argument, get-developers will return the appropriate git send-email command. If the -e option is passed, only the email addresses are printed in a format suitable for git send-email --cc-cmd.
When using the -a <arch> command line option, get-developers will return the list of developers in charge of the given architecture.
When using the -p <package> command line option, get-developers will return the list of developers in charge of the given package.
When using the -c command line option, get-developers will look at all files under version control in the Buildroot repository, and list the ones that are not handled by any developer. The purpose of this option is to help completing the DEVELOPERS file.
When using the -v command line option, it validates the integrity of the DEVELOPERS file and will note WARNINGS for items that don’t match.